]]>“Who run the world? Girls.” [i] Beyoncé, Malala Yousafzai, and Wall Street’s ‘Fearless Girl’ all point to a sea change in how young girls are seen in the popular imagination. No longer shown only as damsels in distress, girls are increasingly portrayed as heroines, capable of saving us from complex global challenges. As complexity begins to emerge in girls’ narratives, we need theory, research, and interventions to follow. Contested Femininity: Strategies of Resistance and Reproduction Across Adolescence in Northern Uganda,” published in Culture, Health & Sexuality does just that: it shows us the complex reality of girls’ lives and the decisions they make on the journey from girlhood to adulthood in the patriarchal context of post-conflict northern Uganda.

The article draws from ten life stories of 10 to 19-year-old girls, told at several points in time as part of research conducted between 2012 to 2014 for the six-year Gender Roles, Equality and Transformations project in northern Uganda. In this blog post, the authors of the article share what we consider to be the most important implications for research, theory, and practice.

Research: Learning to Tell Many-Dimensional Stories

We were amazed by the complex ways that the young girls whose stories we share express femininities. By telling their stories, we participate in the ongoing work to avoid what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the danger of a single story.”[ii] Through our research, we learned that each young girl whose story we tell developed her own multifaceted ways of upholding and subverting accepted femininity. We identified what the literature calls “regulated liberties,” strategies that are culturally acceptable on their face, but subversive in some way. A simple example is how some of the pregnant girls were able to negotiate with their parents and partner for a formal marriage and use it to further their own goals. On the surface, this adheres to marriage norms, but for many of the girls, a formal marriage was a strategy to accumulate the social capital that comes with the status of wife and mother. Explicit acts of resistance may be easier to spot, but our article shows that small acts of resistance and the small gains they afford are no less significant, and should be acknowledged, appreciated, and built upon.

Theory: Rounding Out Gender Systems

Theories of gender hegemony — simply explained as the socially-accepted qualities of masculinity and femininity that interact to support the dominant position of men in societies — have tended to focus more on masculinity than femininity. If you search for scholarly articles on the subject, as we did, you’ll find that only a tiny proportion mention hegemonic femininity compared to masculinity. Our article begins to fill this gap, showing how girls learn to be feminine in different arenas of their lives, in relation to masculinities, and across the key girl-to-young-adult years of their lives. This is an undertheorized area, especially as it plays out in the low-resource, post-conflict contexts these girls live and grow up in. We explored how girls accumulate social capital (by being an obedient daughter or having their first child) and lose social capital (experiencing an assault or an unplanned pregnancy). Crucially, it allowed us to see how they channeled that social capital or compensated for its lack to strive for their own goals.

Practice: Making Theory and Research Count Where It Matters

So, how do these results contribute to understanding the ways that femininity is resisted and reproduced? Our research showed that girls can subtly resist prevailing femininities, including through the regulated liberties we described above. In addition, our work allowed us to build on theories of how girls use social capital at different points in their lives to resist oppressive norms. Behavior change implementers who look to social capital as a potential leverage may find effective strategies to increase girls’ agency while minimizing backlash. Interventions employing these strategies during key moments in girls’ lives might result in very real—if very small—positive shifts for girls’ agency, well-being, and health. Based on our study, we offer this guidance to programs which seek to empower girls:

Trust and involve the local actors who deeply understand the context you’re planning on working in and the gender norms you wish to address, and,

Remember that incremental progress is still progress. Small shifts and small acts of resistance can make a meaningful difference.

The girls involved in our study lived complex lives, and the stories they shared with us are rich with meaning. We believe that the global development field is strengthened when researchers, theorists, and practitioners unite to center their efforts on the multifaceted lived experiences of the people we serve.

]]>Social Norms Change Beyond Direct Beneficiaries: Research and Programmatic Lessons from the Change Starts at Home Trialhttp://irh.org/measurement_10/
Thu, 31 Oct 2019 17:08:28 +0000http://irh.org/?p=12773The Learning Collaborative to Advance Normative Change is a network of experts committed to facilitating collaboration between organizations and individuals working on adolescent and youth norms-shifting interventions.…

]]>The Learning Collaborative to Advance Normative Change is a network of experts committed to facilitating collaboration between organizations and individuals working on adolescent and youth norms-shifting interventions. Members are working collectively to build knowledge and tools to promote and guide effective social norm theory, measurement, and practice. To this end, we have developed aseries of blogs to clarify some of the key concepts in social norms work.

As anyone who develops programs and does research on programs knows, there are the two main questions donors and the broader practice community want answered:

Does it work, and

Can it be scaled up to achieve value for money?

There is no denying these are important questions that should be asked, but they are also incredibly difficult to answer. This is particularly the case when thinking about changing social norms, as social norms change may take as long as one or two generations rather than the few years of a typical development grant. But how can we achieve and measure impacts—both for the initial beneficiaries and beyond—within this shorter time frame?

One approach to scaling up cost-effectively is to emphasize diffusion, designing programs to diffuse impact beyond the initial set of beneficiaries. To detect and measure this diffusion, some practitioners are using social network approaches. The Change Starts at Home trial, an evaluation of multi-component social behavior change communication (SBCC) program that aims to shift the attitudes, norms and behaviors that underpin intimate partner violence perpetration in Nepal, has a few lessons to share on this topic:

2) Quantitative measurement can also be important in diffusion-focused social norms work. Often, formative research to understand a community and the norms at play is done through qualitative work., We have found that understanding interpersonal relationships in detail, including through quantitative measurement, has provided important insights into the “who” and “how” of diffusion. In the Change Starts at Home trial, our quantitative survey found that messaging was largely being transmitted within the household, and through very close geospatial relationships, such as neighbors and friends.

3) Diffusion is an important mechanism for social norms change. Among the trial’s intervention communities, there was a clear relationship between the amount of diffusion and the amount of social norms change within those communities. This relationship existed at programmatically-relevant levels among communities with the most inequitable gender norms at the start of programming.

4) Diffusion of social norms messaging through trusted sources can be as impactful as the original message. In a recent collaborative paper focused on organized diffusion, findings from the Change Starts at Home trial highlighted an interesting finding. Direct exposure to program messaging was associated with providing support to violence survivors, regardless of the amount of diffusion within the community. However, individuals who were not directly exposed to the program’s messaging but lived in communities with a high amount of diffusion also were more likely to provide support to violence survivors. This was not true of individuals who were not exposed to messaging and did not live in communities with a high amount of diffusion.

In sum, social network assessment can be a useful tool for facilitating a richer understanding of potential diffusion networks. This includes identifying the family and community members who are involved in these networks and should be targeted for programming, those who are positive deviants for relevant behavior and beliefs, and, in socio-culturally diverse settings like Nepal, those who might act as bridges between different social networks. The Change Starts at Home team learned that measuring and deeply understanding these networks both qualitatively and quantitatively was key to seeing changes and patterns that more traditional sampling methods might have missed altogether.

Cari Clark, ScD, MPH, is Associate Professor of Global Health at Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. She has nearly 20 years of experience in the field of violence research including violence prevention, screening and response, and the examination of the social drivers and health consequences of its occurrence.

Gemma Ferguson, MSc, works for Equal Access International as a Technical Adviser. She has over 14 years’ experience in radio production and social behavior change communications for development

About Change Starts at Home: The Change Starts at Home trial was an evaluation of a Social and Behavior Change Communication strategy designed to shift norms and behavior around intimate partner violence. This study was based largely on communications and social norms theories that emphasize the interconnectedness of behavior across individuals in reference groups and the embeddedness of individuals and their associated behaviors within a broader a social ecology. It was funded through DFID’s flagship What Works to Prevent Violence Against Women.

]]>What’s documentation got to do with it? Examining the evidence on scale-up of social norms interventions for adolescent and youth reproductive healthhttp://irh.org/lc_crosspost_1/
Mon, 21 Oct 2019 15:52:33 +0000http://irh.org/?p=12757Originally published on FHI 360’s R&E Search for Evidence blog. The Learning Collaborative to Advance Normative Change is a network of experts committed to facilitating collaboration between…

The Learning Collaborative to Advance Normative Change is a network of experts committed to facilitating collaboration between organizations and individuals working on adolescent and youth norms-shifting interventions. Members are working collectively to build knowledge and tools to promote and guide effective social norm theory, measurement, and practice. In addition to our blog series to clarify some of the key concepts in social norms work, we’ll be posting blogs by Learning Collaborative members.

It should come as no surprise that adolescent and youth reproductive health (AYRH) outcomes are heavily influenced by factors beyond individual control. Increasingly, therefore, public health interventions designed to support healthy AYRH behaviors are looking beyond individual-level factors and seeking to change social norms. For example, a prevalent social norm in many countries is that girls should leave school, get married and have children early. An intervention that seeks to shift or replace these norms with norms that value gender equity and girls’ education (i.e., normative change) may enable girls to delay marriage and childbearing.

While evidence of the effectiveness of these interventions is growing (ALIGN, 2019), understanding how to achieve scale-up to reach a larger population and thus achieve wider impact remains quite limited. As part of the Passages Project, we worked with colleagues at Save the Children and the Institute for Reproductive Health to analyze peer-reviewed and grey literature that describes AYRH interventions with community-based normative change components that have scaled-up in low- and middle-income countries. We learned that scaling up multifaceted normative change interventions is possible, but better evidence is needed to guide the process.

Methodology

We used a combination of terms from three main domains – normative change, scale-up and AYRH interventions – to search relevant literature spanning 17 years (2000–2017) from Google Scholar, ScienceDirect and JSTOR. Figure 1 in the paper shows our full review process. Documentation included during our review had to describe: interventions with a focus on AYRH outcomes; interventions with normative change activities or components; and either the intervention’s efforts to scale-up or the results achieved from scale-up activities. The ExpandNet scale-up framework guided our conceptual understanding of scale-up. After applying all our review criteria, we included only 13 community-based normative change projects in the final review.

We then searched project websites between February 2017 and April 2017 to identify additional scale-up documentation on these projects. As a team, we reviewed the available literature and reached consensus on common themes.

We analyzed the documentation from both searches to identify: common characteristics of normative change interventions that achieved scale-up; scale-up processes employed; and factors that facilitated or inhibited scale-up. We originally intended to document intervention components that contributed to normative change and how these specific components achieved scale-up. However, we found the documentation unclear as to which components explicitly contributed to normative change outcomes. Additionally, we discovered it’s unlikely that any one component acts in isolation of other components. Consequently, our analysis was not able to document characteristics that can be directly attributed to normative change components. Instead we document characteristics of and scale-up processes employed by interventions that include normative change components.

Findings

Despite the limited amount of information, we find that scale-up typically is achieved through employment of multiple scale-up strategies and that four overarching factors facilitate or inhibit scale-up processes: 1) monitoring data, 2) intervention design, 3) substantive community and government-sector partnerships, and 4) the availability of financial and human resources. Here we break down these factors.

First, about half of the interventions mention that the use of monitoring and evaluation systems is important for guiding scale-up efforts. When scale-up involves cross-organizational monitoring, it is useful for multiple organizations to share core indicators. Often, however, monitoring systems developed for pilot implementation need to be adapted or simplified to accommodate new contexts and organizational systems during scale-up. Monitoring and evaluation guidance documents and tools, combined with capacity building of user organizations, are identified as critical supports to maintain fidelity of the core normative change components during scale-up.

Second, we find that many of the interventions cite designing the intervention with the end in mind (i.e., planning for scale-up at the outset) as a critical factor in their success for later expansion and institutionalization. Some projects developed a strategic scale-up plan at an early stage in project implementation. Other projects budgeted capacity-building activities to train local organizations to independently implement the interventions over time. Still others noted that developing easily adaptable project activities and materials facilitated subsequent scale-up.

Third, we find the most frequently mentioned facilitators of scale-up are partnerships with and support from community groups and government stakeholders. Some of the interventions sought to ensure stakeholder buy-in through advocacy and early engagement. Others incorporated measures to align intervention components with government policies, systems or NGO platforms so that the interventions could be easily integrated into existing programs.

Finally, the findings show the need for human and financial resources is the biggest challenge to scale-up and the challenge that is most affected by the normative change components of the intervention. For instance, unique to normative change interventions, several of the interventions mentioned an additional human resource need critical to achieving success – working with staff to identify and clarify their own norms and roles as change agents. Additionally, the timeframe for reaching tipping points and demonstrating effectiveness of normative change efforts is likely to require longer than the standard three- to five-year timeframes of most health-focused projects since changing social norms requires changing the beliefs of many individuals.

Implications

The few interventions included in this review and the scant documentation of scale-up processes highlight the need for more research and evaluation, as well as better articulation and documentation of scale-up of normative change interventions and lessons learned. Despite the need for more evidence, the insights gleaned from our review are not dissimilar from findings on factors that facilitate scale-up in other types of health interventions. Our review can also provide some key insights on the distinct challenges inherent in scaling up programs designed to shift social norms. As such, our findings provide an important starting point to inform future normative change programming for AYRH as well as have broad applicability for incorporating normative change programming into other health sectors.

Greater shared learning across the many organizations that are implementing and scaling up normative change interventions is needed to improve measurement and analysis of normative change and its scale-up and ultimately ensure sustained impact of these initiatives.

To join the Learning Collaborative, or if you are interested in having a blog post featured as part of our series, please contact Cait Davin (cait.davin@georgetown.edu).

How do you prevent child marriage and early pregnancy for adolescent girls? Empower their grandmothers. A qualitative exploration of the mechanisms of change in the Girls’ Holistic Development program in Senegal
16:30 – 18:00 | Exhibition Hall 8.1 | PanelPresenter(s): Anjalee Kohli, Institute for Reproductive Health

Developing and testing measures for social norms around violence and gender: findings from the DRC and Nigeria
11:00 – 13:00 | Daisy and Freesia | Flash presentationPresenter(s): Bryan Shaw, Institute for Reproductive Health

Friday, October 25th 2019

Making norms-shifting the norm for violence prevention programs! Guidance and Tools from the Learning Collaborative to Advance Normative Change
9:00 – 12:00 | Freesia | Side EventPresenter(s): Members of the Learning Collaborative

]]>The Learning Collaborative to Advance Normative Change: Where We’ve Been and Where We’re Goinghttp://irh.org/the-learning-collaborative-to-advance-normative-change-where-weve-been-and-where-were-going/
Fri, 20 Sep 2019 13:12:39 +0000http://irh.org/?p=12720The Learning Collaborative to Advance Normative Change is a network of experts committed to facilitating collaboration between organizations and individuals working on adolescent and youth norms-shifting interventions.…

]]>The Learning Collaborative to Advance Normative Change is a network of experts committed to facilitating collaboration between organizations and individuals working on adolescent and youth norms-shifting interventions. Members are working collectively to build knowledge and tools to promote and guide effective social norm theory, measurement, and practice. To this end, we have developed aseries of blogs to clarify some of the key concepts in social norms work.

In our previous blog, we took a look back on the Learning Collaborative’s special supplement in the Journal of Adolescent Health, “Advancing Social Norms Practice for Adolescent and Youth Sexual and Reproductive Health: The Why and the How.” In this, our tenth blog of the series, we look back over the origin, accomplishments, and next steps of the Learning Collaborative.

How to identify whether and what norms are affecting particular outcomes?

How to design interventions to affect normative transformation – at scale?

Can social norm interventions achieve sustained change?

What IS a social norm intervention? …. AND

How to measure shifts in social norms?

The Global Learning Collaborative (LC) to Advance Normative Change grew out of the recognition that researchers, implementing organizations, and donors were all struggling to answer these same questions. This is so often the case— organizations work within their own spheres of activity to find solutions, while others are simultaneously and separately wrestling with the same issues. In this case, ‘the stars aligned’ to bring together funding and organizations. A truly collaborative collaboration ensued, joined by approximately 300 people from almost 100 organizations. Experts with varied backgrounds and skills worked together to unpack the complexity embodied in understanding and addressing social norms that affect outcomes at the community level.

Funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in partnership with the USAID-funded Passages Project, the LC began in December, 2016, with a meeting of researchers, donors, and implementers. The group discussed social norms-related issues common among them and charted the path of the LC. Since then, members of the Collaborative have produced key documents that synthesize what is known about theory, research, measurement, and practice related to social norms; and developed tools to identify social norms that are relevant in particular contexts and to determine by whom and how those norms are reinforced. These documents and tools can be used to inform the design of interventions to promote positive social norms, to monitor implementation, and to assess what works and what is not working within community-based interventions to affect social transformation.

In addition to the collaboratively-produced documents, the LC has served as a nexus to its members. A survey of members of the LC revealed that connections across the professional networks that were fostered by the Collaborative more than doubled. Interactions among members included sharing and promoting each other’s work; providing feedback and sharing resources; collaborating on papers, abstracts, reports or blog posts; collaborating on the implementation of projects or studies; working on grant proposals or design of proposal solicitations; and conducting joint training, such as webinars and workshops.

Now that the LC has successfully contributed toward strengthening global technical leadership on social norms during its first phase…what’s next? The Hewlett Foundation will join the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID funding to support the LC – Phase 2. How will Phase 2 expand upon the work initiated under the first phase? That will be determined by the Collaborative. In the meantime, there has been significant evolution during the past couple years toward addressing the questions raised at the initiation of the LC. Recognition of the importance of addressing social norms has continued to grow, and, at global level, there are more examples of how to do so. In addition to expanding on the answers to those questions raised at the beginning of the LC, more questions still remain. These might include, for example:

How to advances knowledge on social norms at a global level to reach those at regional and country-levels and enable them to incorporate state-of-the-art evidence and tools into their research and implementation efforts?

When and how to incorporate lessons gleaned from FP/RH-focused social norms work in other areas of health (e.g. Nutrition, WASH, maternal, newborn, and child health, etc.) and other sectors (e.g. Agriculture, Education, Economic Strengthening, etc.)?

To join the Learning Collaborative, and work with us to answer these and more questions, please contact Cait Davin (cait.davin@georgetown.edu).

Linda Sussman, M.Ed., Ph.D., is a Senior Program Research Advisor in the Research, Technology, and Utilization Division of the Office of Population and Reproductive Health, Bureau of Global Health, at the United States Agency for International Development.

]]>ICYMI: Veering from the Narrow Path with the Learning Collaborative Special Supplementhttp://irh.org/measurement_9/
Fri, 19 Jul 2019 12:56:54 +0000http://irh.org/?p=12627The Learning Collaborative to Advance Normative Change is a network of experts committed to facilitating collaboration between organizations and individuals working on adolescent and youth norms-shifting interventions.…

]]>The Learning Collaborative to Advance Normative Change is a network of experts committed to facilitating collaboration between organizations and individuals working on adolescent and youth norms-shifting interventions. Members are working collectively to build knowledge and tools to promote and guide effective social norm theory, measurement, and practice. To this end, we have developed aseries of blogs to clarify some of the key concepts in social norms work.

In our previous blog, we discussed the use of qualitative vignettes for social norms measurement. In this, our ninth blog of the series, we take a look back on the Learning Collaborative’s special supplement in the Journal of Adolescent Health, “Advancing Social Norms Practice for Adolescent and Youth Sexual and Reproductive Health: The Why and the How.”

Since the 1990s, one of the most prominent approaches to social norms arose in the fields of social psychology and communication studies. At the risk of oversimplifying, this approach works as follows: Individuals are more likely to do “behavior X” to the extent that they believe that others in their reference group do X (or perceived descriptive norms) and/or that others in their reference group approve of people doing X (or perceived injunctive norms). There’s plenty of scientific evidence to support these propositions. One advantage of this approach is that it lends itself to empirical research; another is that it leads naturally to interventions that use communications to influence people’s perceptions of how widespread or widely approved a behavior is. The approach has been used with mixed results on a wide range of behaviors and settings, from binge drinking among college undergraduates to electricity use by household residents.

Yet this social psychology/communications approach has limitations, two of which are particularly important here. First, the approach is narrow in that it deals with one behavior at a time, ignoring the reality that many behaviors (including those related to adolescent and youth sexual and reproductive health) are closely related. It can be misleading to study condom use without also considering sexual activity across a diverse set of partnerships. Second, in attempting to isolate a given behavior from a complex set of interrelated behaviors, the approach tends to ignore other aspects of social context. For one thing, it may be useful to think of descriptive and injunctive norms as both individual perceptions that exist within an individual’s mind as well as informal rules that exist within groups. For another, these informal rules can be deeply embedded within larger social systems of institutionalized roles, relationships between roles, and social power.

If not the “narrow path”, what is the path forward?

All of the papers that appeared in the special supplement departed in one way or another from this narrow approach. Some did so by measuring norms at a collective level rather than as individual level perceptions. Others did so by examining how norms that are explicitly about a given behavior may influence not only that behavior but also other related behaviors. Some of the commentaries also sought to place social norms within a larger social context, including gender dynamics, institutions, and power, and arguing that in some instances structural change may be a prerequisite for changes in social norms.

This departure from the “narrow path” is a useful and important development in the field, but there is a risk that the advantages of this approach from social psychology and communication studies will be lost, including significant strides made in measuring and studying the impact of interventions on social norms. Maintaining scientific rigor while moving to a broader approach to social norms will require effort from all members of the social norms research and implementation community.

This is a very exciting time to be part of the community of scholars and practitioners studying social norms related to a wide range of behaviors, populations, and settings. It was my pleasure and privilege to serve as guest editor for the Learning Collaborative’s special supplement to the Journal of Adolescent Health, and look forward to continuing to observe and, hopefully, contribute to the processes by which our understanding of these phenomena and our thinking about how most effectively to intervene become deeper, more sophisticated, and always based on sound science. To join the Learning Collaborative, please contact Cait Davin (cait.davin@georgetown.edu).

Jeffrey “Bart” Bingenheimer, PhD, MPH, is a Professor in the Department of Prevention and Community Health at George Washington University. An expert in the social determinants of health-related behavior, social epidemiology, and the quantitative methods for studying both, his current research focuses on the influences of gendered family, peer group, and community contexts of behavioral risk factors for HIV, STIs, and pregnancy among adolescents and young adults in Ghana.

]]>A Recap from the Learning Collaborative Summit on Social Norms Research and Practicehttp://irh.org/lc-summit-recap/
Fri, 28 Jun 2019 19:07:08 +0000http://irh.org/?p=12569The Learning Collaborative to Advance Normative Change is a network of experts committed to facilitating collaboration between organizations and individuals working on adolescent and youth norms-shifting interventions.…

]]>The Learning Collaborative to Advance Normative Change is a network of experts committed to facilitating collaboration between organizations and individuals working on adolescent and youth norms-shifting interventions. Members are working collectively to build knowledge and tools to promote and guide effective social norm theory, measurement, and practice. To this end, we have developed a series of blogs to clarify some of the key concepts in social norms work.

At the end of May, the Learning Collaborative to Advance Normative Change (LC) marked two years of partnership with a series of meetings to share LC resources and learning, take stock of our progress advancing social norms thinking and practice, and identify priority areas for further learning.

The meetings kicked off with the launch of the special Supplement in the Journal of Adolescent Health, “Advancing Social Norms Practice for Adolescent and Youth Sexual and Reproductive Health: The Why and the How,” published in April 2019. Sohail Agha (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) opened the evening, introducing the supplement and the recognizing the cooperation it represents (including over 60 authors, reviewers and editors). Audience members heard from supplement contributors, including a panel each comprising commentary authors, manuscript authors, and experts with varying field perspectives. A key takeaway across panels was the importance of process documentation and program evaluation — especially when looking to scale-up — and sharing these learnings, indicators, and measurements with other social norms practitioners.

The following day, at the Summit on Social Norms Research and Practice, Learning Collaborative members dove head first into the sticky issues of social norms-focused interventions: How can we more accurately measure social norms? How do we approach norms-shifting interventions with cultural sensitivity and respect for our communities? What are the ethical ramifications of our personal, organizational and donor biases? How can we better speak about and collaborative on normative interventions across sectors? And how do we distill all of this information and guidance in a way that’s practical for program implementers? Grappling with these issues, Learning Collaborative members including donors, researchers, and practitioners exchanged evidence, ideas, and resources in a cooperative effort to advance the social norms field. Please watch this space for blog posts addressing some of these timely and important ideas!

Following this dynamic exchange of ideas, a smaller group of Learning Collaborative members met to address opportunities and directions for the future of this initiative. To facilitate future iterations of the Learning Collaborative, one of the day’s sessions focused on exploring potential synergies and learning from partners. During the group work of the last session, a thoughtful discussion on ethics unfolded, picking up the threads of the previous day’s discussions on agenda setting for social norms interventions. Participants interrogated the unintended consequences of social norms interventions, including inequity, harmful consequences, and backlash, who is accountable, and how unethical practices can be disrupted.

The meetings closed with a re-commitment to what the LC has represented since its inception: a forum for elevating voices, an incubator for fostering connections both formal and informal, and a space to learn from each other.

]]>Up close and personal with the hottest trend in social norms measurement: Qualitative vignetteshttp://irh.org/measurement_7/
Wed, 26 Jun 2019 17:49:28 +0000http://irh.org/?p=12564The Learning Collaborative to Advance Normative Change is a network of experts committed to facilitating collaboration between organizations and individuals working on adolescent and youth norms-shifting interventions.…

]]>The Learning Collaborative to Advance Normative Change is a network of experts committed to facilitating collaboration between organizations and individuals working on adolescent and youth norms-shifting interventions. Members are working collectively to build knowledge and tools to promote and guide effective social norm theory, measurement, and practice. To this end, we have developed aseries of blogs to clarify some of the key concepts in social norms work.

In our previous blog, we discussed the importance of taking time at the formative stage of a norms-shifting intervention to collect, analyze, and interpret information to explore whether and how social norms are influencing a given behavior in a particular context. In this, our seventh blog of the series, we explore the use of qualitative vignettes for social norms measurement.

Let me tell you a story about a fictional character named Leigh. Leigh considers herself a reliable person, and values her work relationships. One day, a colleague we’ll call Bryan asked her to write a blog on vignettes. She was excited and agreed to do it, even though she was not sure when she would find time. She even told a lot of other colleagues she was going to write it, including making a public pledge at a meeting of experts. Months wore on, and Leigh still hadn’t found time to write the blog.

Now ask yourselves:

What would Leigh’s colleagues’ opinions be of her in this situation?

Would Leigh’s expectations about the negative opinions of her colleagues lead her to write the blog after all?

As social norms theory has increasingly captured the attention of the international development community over the past five years or so, so too has the use of qualitative vignettes as a promising method for identifying and measuring social norms.

Vignettes have been used for decades, and are “short stories about imaginary characters in specific contexts, with guiding questions that invite people to respond to the story in a structured way.”[i] Vignettes can help reveal how social norms operate in a groupby investigating social expectations – that is, respondents’ expectations about what other people would do or think. Qualitative vignettes in particular lend themselves to a more nuanced picture of the process and dynamics of social norms change.

How are vignettes useful for measuring social norms?

Vignettes can be used both to diagnose whether certain social norms exist in a specific context, and to measure norm strength (e.g., rigidity, influence) and flux.

Vignettes focus on respondents’ expectations about other people, relevant for understanding social norms.

Vignettes can manipulate the social expectations and reference groups they describe, and observe effects on behavior in respondents.[ii]

By asking people to share perceptions about other people’s behavior and attitudes, vignettes help curtail respondent bias and elicit more truthful responses about sensitive topics than questions about personal attitudes and practices.

Vignettes are fun! Stories are more engaging and interesting for people than a series of direct questions.

How do you write vignettes?

Fortunately, there are various helpful guidance resources for designing and writing vignettes (see links below). One main challenge with using qualitative vignettes is how best to write vignettes to elicit useful data, and then how to analyze that data to inform programming. To do this, CARE created the Social Norms Analysis Plot (SNAP) as a framework to help practitioners translate complicated social norms theory into practical measures for norms that can be integrated in to program M&E. The “Leigh” vignette and questions are an example of an application of the SNAP that could be asked to respondents to explore their perceptions about social pressure and its influence on behavior.

Even with their advantages, there are some challenges to designing, running and analyzing qualitative vignettes. Vignettes can be a heavy lift in terms of both program staff time and capacity, especially as norms are just one potential factor among many to influencing programmatic outcomes. In CARE’s experience, it generally takes about 45 minutes to run a vignette in a focus group discussion.

In addition, there have been mixed reviews about how well vignettes work for adolescents. For some projects, vignettes have worked well with younger respondent groups, who enjoy the stories, find them engaging, and don’t seem to struggle with the hypothetical nature of the questions. In other projects, adolescents have struggled with distinctions between their own personal attitudes and behaviors, and their expectations about others when responding to vignettes. More experience is needed to understand when and for which age groups qualitative vignettes work best — is it a question of researcher training? Respondent literacy? Other factors?

Are vignettes right for your work? Check out the following resources to learn more:

Leigh Stefanik, MA is a Senior Gender Advisor at CARE She supports learning on and integration of gender transformative approaches across CARE’s work, including a focus on social norms and GBV prevention.
To join the Learning Collaborative, please contact Cait Davin (cait.davin@georgetown.edu).

]]>The Learning Collaborative to Advance Normative Changeis a network of experts committed to facilitating collaboration between organizations and individuals working on adolescent and youth norms-shifting interventions. Members are working collectively to build knowledge and tools to promote and guide effective social norm theory, measurement, and practice. To this end, we have developed aseries of blogs to clarify some of the key concepts in social norms work.

In our previous blog, we reflected on assessing the cost of norms-shifting interventions. In this, our sixth blog of the series, we discuss the importance of taking time at the formative stage of a norms-shifting intervention to collect, analyze, and interpret information to explore whether and how social norms are influencing a given behavior in a particular context. Here we provide examples of techniques and processes to identify and explore norms.

Why is this important?

Identifying the multiple factors that uphold a behavior leads to more programs more closely addressing barriers to behavior change. While social and behavior change programs often include group and community elements, formative research to identify, define, and program for social norms that uphold or prevent behavior shifts has been limited. A social norms exploration builds understanding of the normative dynamics in play, clarifying important details, patterns and relationships that can be leveraged or targeted in programs. It’s also essential for informing the measures that will accurately capture and monitor changes in these norms among program populations.

As interest in social norms has grown, so too has the need for simple, practical tools to identify key social norms behind behaviors of interest. In 2017, the Learning Collaborative produced a working Background Reader to inform a technical consultation that included a range of useful tools to train staff, explore, and frame social norms work.

How to frame diagnosing social norms?

Social norms matter because they influence behavior: some perpetuate harmful practices and reinforce gender inequities. With a solid understanding of social norms in a specific community, and who maintains—or is perceived to maintain—these norms, practitioners can design more relevant and effective programs.

Exploring norms at the start of your project might seem like a big task to tackle. To help, the Learning Collaborative has determined four questions that serve as helpful markers in your exploration:

So what can you do to answer these questions?

Reviewing existing literature is a logical first step to inform the measurement social norms of interest to your program. Although there may few norms-focused studies relevant to your program, there are likely datasets on related concepts that can be reviewed for useful information. These datasets include:

Reviewing this information is a good first step, but secondary data sources have their limits. They may provide broad information, but can rarely inform program action on social norms in every context.

Primary data collection can be as simple as exploring aspects of norms in focus group discussions and/or in-depth interviews. Questions can also be asked through more innovative methods, such as interactive participatory activities and exercises, or qualitative vignettes, hypothetical examples of people and behaviors on which respondents can offer comment or opinion. These techniques and methods for exploring and measuring social norms will be more fully explored in the next three blogs.

In response to the need for simple and practical tools, we’ve developed the Social Norms Exploration Tool (SNET) under the Passages project and the Learning Collaborative. The SNET is a rapid, participatory guide and set of exercises that translate theory into practical guidance, allowing users to quickly gather critical information needed to identify social norms and address the four questions above. This information can directly feed into program design or adaptation. It has been used in 10 programs to date.

To learn more, check out the following resources and stay tuned for our next blog:

Bryan Shaw, PhD, is a Senior Research Officer at IRH and supports research efforts in the Passages Project. He is also a co-facilitator of the Social Norms Measurement sub-community of the Learning Collaborative.

]]>Georgetown Researchers Launch “Nari Paila,” Mobile Games to Share Information on Fertility Awareness, Family Planning in Nepalhttp://irh.org/georgetown-researchers-launch-nari-paila-mobile-games-to-share-information-on-fertility-awareness-family-planning-in-nepal/
Sun, 24 Mar 2019 19:00:14 +0000http://irh.org/?p=12248WASHINGTON (March 24, 2019) – This month, Georgetown researchers launched a series of mobile games in Nepal to reach young people with information about fertility awareness…

The Nari Paila mobile games are an adaptation of Nepalese community games called Pragati. “We know that games can be extremely effective at increasing knowledge and changing behavior,” said Dominick Shattuck, PhD, senior research officer at the Institute for Reproductive Health, a part of Georgetown University Medical Center. “We want the games to provide adolescents with a safe space to learn about their bodies and make informed decisions in the future.”

Despite progress in education and health services in Nepal, traditional gender norms continue to influence how people behave. Discussing reproductive health remains taboo and pervasive myths about menstruation and family planning reinforce normative behaviors restricting women’s and girls’ movement. Preference for sons over daughters devalues girls, and early marriage remains a problem. In the games, a multi-generational family makes decisions related to those who are menstruating, menstrual hygiene management, fertility awareness, family planning, and son preference. Along the way, players interact with characters from Nepali folklore, including a helpful goat and a tricky yeti.

About the Institute for Reproductive Health
The Institute for Reproductive Health at Georgetown University Medical Center has more than 30 years of experience in designing and implementing evidence-based programs that address critical needs in sexual and reproductive health. The Institute’s areas of research and program implementation include family planning, adolescents, gender equality, fertility awareness, and mobilizing technology for reproductive health. The Institute is highly respected for its focus on the introduction and scale-up of sustainable approaches to family planning and fertility awareness around the world. For more information, visit www.irh.org.

About Georgetown University Medical Center
Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) is an internationally recognized academic health and science center with a four-part mission of research, teaching, service and patient care (through MedStar Health). GUMC’s mission is carried out with a strong emphasis on public service and a dedication to the Catholic, Jesuit principle of cura personalis — or “care of the whole person.” The Medical Center includes the School of Medicine and the School of Nursing & Health Studies, both nationally ranked; Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center, designated as a comprehensive cancer center by the National Cancer Institute; and the Biomedical Graduate Research Organization, which accounts for the majority of externally funded research at GUMC including a Clinical and Translational Science Award from the National Institutes of Health. Connect with GUMC on Facebook (Facebook.com/GUMCUpdate), Twitter (@gumedcenter).